Finding what's lost

Sometimes Losing Stuff Helps You to Find What's Important.

After dealing with a cancer diagnosis and treatment, I felt the urge to take poems out of their neat folders or, workshops and let them meet people. Victor Hugo said: “Nothing else in the world…not all the armies…is so powerful as an idea whose time has come.” (Victor Hugo, The Future of Man. From the series Great Ideas of Western Man)

From another perspective, it is a new beginning after having lost much of my poetry before the 2018 Dodge Poetry Festival. At the festival, I met Ntozake Shange and talked about how much I admired her work and performed monologues from For Colored Girls* at all of my college auditions. She was elated and we took a selfie together. A short time after the festival ended (October 2018), I received a call informing me that Ntozake had passed away. On that very somber day, I opened an attic closet and discovered all of my work neatly stowed away in a box. My voice and history had been given back but, I wondered how the presence of it had escaped me for so long. This was a reminder that life is punctuated by losses and gains.

This is a journey that is constantly evolving and challenging me to respond to what needs to be said and done in the present times. There is a sense of urgency to be heard, not so much as a lauded poet but, as a voice that speaks out against destructive forces and ideologies. The fire is sparked in the very moment we refuse to be silent anymore.

"What are the words you do not yet have? What do you need to say? What are the tyrannies you swallow day by day and attempt to make your own until you will sicken and die of them."- Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider

Ntozake Shange and a. adenike taking selfie during

2018 Dodge Poetry Festival in Newark, NJ.

Ntozake Shange (1948 - 2018)